Anton Strout - Dead Matter

“Sorry…” I started to say, but Jane simply raised a finger to her lips to shush me. The woman was determined. Who was I to stop her?

I pulled my shirt off as she did hers, leaving her standing there in formfitting red lingerie that definitely had my attention. Jane walked toward me and kissed me deep, pushing me gently toward the edge of the bed. I fell back onto it and her body pressed down on top of mine.

Jane reached out toward one of the bedside lamps, her eyes sliding shut as she concentrated. A tiny string of electronic-sounding gibberish whispered out of her lips and every light in the room turned off.

“Thanks,” I said, smiling even though she couldn’t see me. “Just what I wanted. My own personal Clapper.”

When my eyes finally adjusted to the dark several seconds later, I could see Jane and she wasn’t smiling.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “I’m sorry. Is it because I called you something from the ‘As Seen on TV’ commercials…?”

Jane put her hands on my chest as if to calm me. A lingering hint of electricity jumped between us, sending a different sort of tingle through my body from the one she was already giving me.

“It’s not that,” she said.

“Then what is it?”

“I’m sorry to ruin the moment, but I just had a thought about what you said right before I dragged you off to bed,” she said, “about Connor.”

Normally the last thing I wanted to hear about in my bed was another man, but the look of concern on Jane’s face pushed aside all that.

“What about him?”

Jane rolled off of me, slipped out of bed, and headed back over toward her clothes hanging from the chair.

“You’re right,” she said. “We need to be thinking about what we can do to help him.”

“I’m sure it can wait till morning,” I said. “Not to be insensitive, but he’s probably sleeping right now anyway.”

“That’s just it,” she said. “He hasn’t been sleeping, remember?”

“He’s been having those dreams he told us about…”

“But what if Connor’s not dreaming?” she said, pulling on her shirt. “What if what he told us he dreamt about is actually happening to him?”

The implication hit me and I was out of the bed like a shot, all thoughts of the pleasure I had just been about to experience pushed aside. I headed over to the bottom drawer of my dresser, rooting through it before opting for black jeans and a black T-shirt. This felt like a covert-ops kind of scenario, anyway.

After I put them on, I turned to Jane. She was sliding on her skirt, but ditched it when she saw what I was wearing. We were already at the her-own-drawer stage of our relationship so she walked over, pulled hers open, and fished out a pair of dark capris. When she was done pulling them on, we looked like a pair of German nihilists.

“Now is time on Sprockets when we dance?” she said.

I shook my head.

“Not quite,” I said, picking up my bat and looping it back onto my belt. “Now is time when we spy.”

“Hell’s Kitchen,” Jane said, checking up and down the darkened street for the hundredth time. “It’s not so bad, you know, given the name and all.”

Jane and I were in surveillance mode. We stood on Fifty-ninth Street pretending to hang out, leaning against a wall where we could keep an eye on most of Connor’s building. The streets were relatively quiet for this time of night. Even the cars were few and far between.

“You should have seen this neighborhood a decade ago,” I said. “It was pretty grizzly. I haven’t checked with Godfrey Candella down in the Gauntlet, but I bet if I asked our resident archivist, he’d tell us there used to be a demonic vortex here.”

Jane looked up at the building standing across the street from us. “Which one is Connor’s apartment again? It’s hard to tell from the outside.”

I pulled her closer to me and pointed up to a window just in view along the left side of the building. I counted up three floors. “There,” I said.

“I don’t suppose that’s Connor, then.”

“What?” I asked. “Where?” It was dark inside Connor’s apartment.

Jane grabbed my face and forced my eyes to the side of Connor’s window. She held out her finger in front of me so I could follow it. “There.”

“I don’t see anything…” I said, but stopped myself. One of the shadows outside Connor’s window moved. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now I could make out what looked like a human figure inching along the brickwork. It stopped at Connor’s window and rested its arms along his window ledge.

“What is that?” Jane asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m curious enough to find out.”

I pulled off the lid of a nearby garbage can as slowly and quietly as I could. I was thrilled to see it full of recyclables. I pulled an old Snapple bottle out of it, took aim, and threw it across the street toward the figure, hoping to miss accidentally putting it through Connor’s window. Some of my extracurricular training for the Fraternal Order of Goodness must have paid off, because I hit the shadowy figure square between its shoulders.

“Hey, dick,” I shouted up to it. “You wanna come down here the easy way or the hard way? I got a trash can full of options right here.”

Like a nimble monkey, the figure descended the three stories in seconds, dropping the last ten feet or so to the sidewalk. He took off down the street.

“Either that dude has been spending a lot of time at Chelsea Piers on the rock-climbing walls,” I said, “or we’re dealing with Spider-Man.” I turned to Jane. “That might be cool.”

Jane grabbed my face, and pointed off. The figure was already halfway down the block.

“Focus, hon,” she said.

“Right,” I said, taking off after the figure. “Sorry.”

The guy was damn fast, darting in and out of traffic as he sprinted away. Already my legs were burning, but we were gaining on him. Not that I could make out much about him save that he was dressed for stealth much the same way we were.

After the first two city blocks, my body started giving out. My back still ached like hell, but I focused on our pursuit and pushed past the pain. I was closing the distance. The figure turned again and darted off across traffic, heading along the length of a sleek steel building on the other side of the street.

“Watch the traffic!” I shouted back to Jane and, ignoring my own advice, dove between two cabs that both laid on the horn for a solid ten seconds. By the time they stopped, I was almost caught up to the figure when he turned the corner at the end of the block.

I rounded it seconds later, recognizing in an instant where we were-the west side of Columbus Circle. As I tried to close the distance once again, I couldn’t help but notice the single building straight ahead that took up the entire city block. The front of it was an enormous glass pyramid like the one at the Louvre in France, and it dwarfed the buildings to either side of it. A dozen massive towers shot out of the top of the pyramid, rising high into the night, the entire structure looking like a city unto itself.

The figure dashed for a set of ten-foot-high steel doors off to the far left from the main entrance of the building proper. He flung them open and ran through, stopping only long enough to pull them shut behind him.

I beat Jane to them by a couple seconds and I pulled at the doors, but they were locked, as I suspected. When Jane arrived, she looked as winded as I felt.

“Remind me to leave a pair of cross-trainers at your apartment,” she said, gasping for air. “The shoes I’m wearing are so not made for long-distance running.”

She pointed toward a faceplate set into the wall that blended in with a subtlety that spoke of craftsmanship.